James Kenji Lopez-Alt

A Simple Summer Salad that Explodes with Flavor

Kedai Makan — Kevin Burzell and Alysson Wilson’s Malaysian spot that began as a pop-up in 2013 and evolved into a now-shuttered brick-and-mortar in Capitol Hill — was one of the first places I ate in Seattle after moving here during the pandemic in 2020. I remember plenty of standouts: the roti jala, its delicate egg-net perfect for tearing and dragging through curry; the Malacca-style Hainanese chicken rice. But the dish I never fail to order — and that has never fai...

Mentaiko Spaghetti is Classic Japanese-Italian Comfort Food

This is a recipe I developed for the New York Times. You can get the recipe 100% free with this gift link.

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When I was a kid growing up in Morningside Heights, breakfast at my Japanese grandmother’s apartment one floor below ours almost always meant rice and eggs — sometimes raw, beaten into the rice with soy sauce (tamago kake gohan), but often it was tarako: salted, cured pollock roe, lightly grilled or broi...

Grilled Sausages with Beer-Braised Peppers and Onions Recipe

Every recipe I publish here is personally tested, tasted, and approved.

What I like about this recipe:

Cooking the sausages gently in a pan filled with its toppings ensures that they cook through while staying juicy and flavorful.

Holding the charred sausages warm in the pan of toppings, keeps them plump.

Cooking the toppings directly in an aluminum pan on the grill maximizes efficiency and grilled flavor.

Yield: Serves 6

Active Time: 30 minutes

Total...

Testing the Ooni Volt Indoor Pizza Oven

Tonight—Friday, July 25th—is the night of Tasting Notes, my live multi-sensory stage show produced in Seattle with the members of the Seattle Chamber Music Society, along with some of Seattle's best chefs. You can read more about the event and get tickets with a 20% discount at the link right here.

As part of the show, my friend Lee Kindell (founder of Moto Pizza here in Seattle) and I are...

20% Off Tasting Notes Tickets for Patreon Subscribers! July 25th, Benaroya Hall

Hey folks -

Tasting Notes, my live multi-sensory stage show combining classical chamber music with cooking demonstrations from the world class chefs and top musicians is coming back to Seattle next Friday, July 25th, at Benaroya Hall and I couldn't be more excited.

You can get tickets here. Use the code "kenji20" when checking out for a 20% discount.

The Best Slow-Smoked Pork Chops I've Ever Made

The other day I picked up a few thick-cut pork chops from Beast and Cleaver, my favorite local butcher shop. With such incredible pork and a few beautiful Seattle summer days ahead of me, I wanted to make sure that I made the most of them. That's when I thought about my smoked porterhouse technique.

Years ago, I wrote an artic...

Twelve Rules for Better Burgers

By J. Kenji López-Alt

Grilling season is here, and whether you're smashing them on a flattop, searing over blazing coals, or carefully tending a gas grill, the fundamentals of great burger-making don’t change much. I’ve written about burgers a lot over the years—how to grind the meat, 2025-07-03 17:06:53 +0000 UTC View Post

How to Grill Thin but Juicy Burgers

I wrote about this technique for the New York Times a couple summers ago, based on a Whopper-but-better facsimile I developed years earlier over at Serious Eats. The idea was to get that fast-food-style thin patty—charred, a little smoky, stackable—but cooked on an actual grill, not a gridd...

Why I use Metric Units and Scales when Baking, Even in The Land of Freedom Units

I’ll cut to the chase: using scales and grams for baking recipes is more accurate, it’s faster, and it means less cleanup. At home, I use an 11-pound baking scale from OXO that is no longer in production, but their new model has all the same functions. I also use a small coffee scale from Hario for measuring very small quantities.

• OXO Good Grips 11-Pound Stainless Steel Food Scale with Pull-Out Display
• 2025-06-27 17:25:52 +0000 UTC View Post

Brown Butter is the Secret to this Moist and Tender Corn Bread

A Northern-style cornbread with a crisp crust, a tender crumb, and a nutty hit of brown butter.

Anyone else grow up on Jiffy cornbread mix? My mom regularly mixed one of those blue and white boxes with an egg and milk and used it to top her tamale pie. I’m not sure if its sweet, moist, cake-y flavor has changed at all over the years (to my taste buds it hasn’t), but the packaging has rem...

Sanshoku Don is Japanese Comfort Food for All Ages

This is the meal I make when Alicia is hanging upside down on the rope ladder in our tiny play room, Wombat is in the bathroom trying to look at his own butt, and the cats are dissecting another roll of toilet paper. In other words: it’s quick, easy, and will get zero complaints from the kids when it’s actually time to eat.

Sanshoku don is a simple Japanese rice bowl topped with three components—typically seasoned ground meat, soft scrambled eggs, and greens—arranged in stripes ...

Pizza Dough Sandwiches with Zucchini and Provolone

Making good dough is easy. Stretching that same dough into a thin pizza skin, topping it with wet ingredients, and launching it into a hot pizza oven is not. Even after stretching and launching thousands of pizzas in my life, I’ll bake off the occasional “I wasn’t making pizza—this was always meant to be a calzone” pie.

That’s why I love recipes that are pizza-adjacent, but don’t require nearly as many difficult learned skills. This recipe uses pizza dough (2025-06-13 16:00:17 +0000 UTC View Post

A Meal From the Wok: How to Stir-Fry Three Dishes in a Row

The other day I was cooking a meal for my family in the wok and thought it might be useful for you to see how I cook multiple dishes in a row without compromising their quality. All three of these recipes – Kung Pao Chicken, Fish-fragrant Eggplant, and...

The Full Toshi Kasahara Teriyaki Interview

Yesterday I put up a post that I claimed was a longer version of the interview with Toshi. I accidentally put up the abridged Youtube version on that post.

Here is the actual extended interview.

Meet Toshi Kasahara, The Man Who Invented Chicken Teriyaki as we Know it.

This is the full version — exclusive for you, my beloved Patreon subscribers — of the abbreviated interview you can find on my YouTube channel.

“It’s not a passion!” Toshi Kasahara insists, waving off the suggestion as I sit outside his Mill Creek teriyaki shop — the one where, at 76 years old, he still trims, marinates, and grills chicken thighs five nights a week. It’s just...

The First Grilled Burger of Burger Season

I had some excellent leftover ground beef from Beast and Cleaver from a video shoot last weekend, so I made myself a burger for lunch. It's just a classic grilled cheeseburger, made with great beef.

When making a big fat burger like this (6 ounces per patty or more), it's important to handle the beef gently so that it is minimally compressed, and to form it with a slight dimple in its center–like a red blood cell–s...

I Wrote a Recipe for The Simpsons. Here it is.

A few months my podcasting partner for The Recipe, Deb Perelman (of Smitten Kitchen), got an email from one of the producers of The Simpsons asking if we'd be interested in providing a recipe for an upcoming episode with a chance to appear in the background.

Even when I'm in a phase of my my life where I'm trying to say "no" to more engagements, t...

Ceviche and the Science of Marinating Fish

Ceviche has long since spread from its native Peru ( archaeological evidence reported in El Pais shows native Perucians eating a similar dish nearly 2,000 years ago), past South and Central America, and across the globe, picking up flavors along the way. Though the classic Peruvian version, made with citrus juice, chilies, c...

Public knife drop at noon pacific, today!

Hey folks! We are going to be dropping 25 more knives available publicly at noon Pacific today. If you missed out on Sunday’s private drop, you get another shot! Given that Sunday sold out in under four minutes, we expect these to sell extremely fast as well.

Thank you so much to everyone for supporting this project. Gordon and I are thrilled and overwhelmed at the response. We hope that you enjoy your night as much as we loved designing and making them. There will be more ...